Judges

Multidisciplinary artist
(San Francisco, United States)

Imani Harrington -‘imh’ work extends from an early AIDS human rights activist, artist and writer/playwright whose interdisciplinary artistry work continues with the use of conceptualist tenants.

Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS pandemic she has documented the HIV/AIDS pandemic on topics related to youth, which began over 18 years ago. Her work has remained open and fixed on the impact and plight women were faced during that period and to date. Harrington continues to explore the status and condition of women. She has developed her practice while intersecting with other practices. Her work also examines the complexity of violence, silences, and repression.

Harrington has presented internationally and served as a board member; Harrington is currently assisting as literary editorial evaluator on a journal slated for 2017 publication. Core to her life’s work examines the impact, economic, class, race, gender, class, identity, heritage, stigma, blood ties, and motherhood have on culture and health, and how it impacts art, and narrative practices for artistic expression. She is the initial founder and co-founder and editor of a compendium of plays titled Positive/Negative: Women of Color and HIV/AIDS, Aunt Lute, 2002.

Her visual art consist of sculpture; painting; photography; postcards; poster designs; illustrations, and has art published in print and featured online. She contributed to several fundraisers, where her art work sold for at least two if not for three years.

Photojournalist
(London, England)

Daniella Zalcman (b. 1986) is a documentary photographer based between London and New York. Her work tends to focus on the legacy of western colonialism, from the rise of homophobia in Uganda to the legacy of forced assimilation education on Indigenous youth in North America. She is a multiple grantee of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women's Media Foundation, and a member of Boreal Collective. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture.

Mixed media artist
(Montreal, Canada)

Shan Kelley (b.1977) was raised in the prairie backdrop of Alberta, Canada's beef and petroleum heartland. His practice sits somewhere amidst the slippage of intersections between art and activism. Kelley has a fascination for language, and the manner in which identity, risk, health, and body, are deconstructed, created, and curated.
After an HIV+ diagnosis in 2009, he became increasingly inspired to find his voice within the context of disease and adversity, and to push forward using art as action against apathy or surrender.

Visual artist
(Vancouver, Canada)

We live in a moment in history in which we categorize and judge one another at times recklessly, reducing the complexity of the individual human experience to parochial generalities of ‘otherness’, and the very factuality of events are in dispute.

My recent series of paper cut collages and acrylic and oil on canvas paintings explore how evolutionary archetypes, which have developed for our survival, enable us to compose figures and narratives out of seemingly random arrangements of visual stimuli.

This pattern recognition is highly influenced by our current sets of cultural indicators causing us rush to assumptions about what we are seeing and to hastily fill in emotional, cultural and socio-economic biases and narrative constructions based upon a minimal set of visual clues. But the truth of identity is complex and nuanced and can be cut up in many ways.

By referencing art history, current events and celebrity culture, I’m interested in fleshing out the conflicting scenarios that express the overlooked mythologies in our present contemporary context while probing the tension that exists between figuration and abstraction in my own artistic practice.

Printmaker
(San Francisco, United States)

I am an artist who has been HIV+ since 1986, and had an AIDS diagnosis since 1991. I began using art to deal with all of the sorrow and pain of losing so many friends in the 80's and 90's, as well as the fear that I too, would die soon.
I have done, and still do, art about hiv/aids, but I have transformed my love of making art with a social/political statement to doing many kinds of art with many different messages. I have even begun to make art that focuses solely on beauty.
I am so happy to still be alive, because I have almost died many times.
I am a proud and strong longtime survivor, not only of AIDS, but of many other things.
STILL HERE and STILL MAKING ART!